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This graphic is a biographical timeline that goes along with Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone. The book is Beah’s memoir of his time as a child
soldier in the civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. This is a book I teach in my 10 th-grade literature classes.
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Justification Paper

Audience: This audience for this graphic consists of 10 th-grade students in literature classes that I teach. The subject of the timeline is the

author of a memoir that my students read every year. The audience consists of eight special education students, 18 remedial students,

20 regular education students and 25 college preparatory students. This group includes a wide range reading and writing abilities. There

are also several students who speak English as a second language, but these students all perform as well as the average students in the

class or better.

I decided that this would be a good method of summarizing the events of the memoir because it uses chronological order to chunk the

information. The image of Beah’s face directs the students’ eye in the direction of the chronological order as well as the arrow bar that

continues to draw the viewer’s eye to the right. The boxes and proximity of the facts also help the reader understand that the events or

facts go together during a specific part of Beah’s life. Finally, because this is an educational graphic, I chose to include generative

elements that require the student to fill in. This will require the student to process the information as they help create the graphic which

will hopefully help them remember and understand the information more completely. (Lohr, 2008)

User test: I showed this to a couple of my fellow English teachers. All of them were generally positive about the graphic. The main

complaints were the small size and the fact that the blank spaces may be too short and cramped for some students’ handwriting.
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Another complain was the empty space at the bottom of the boxes, but there were no complaints about the organization or ease of

reading the graphic.

Changes: I agree with the other teachers that size is a problem here. I could easily increase the size of the graphic and provide more

space for the answer blanks for the students, although the graphic looked much more readable in GIMP at 100 percent than it seems to

be when inserted into Word at 100 percent. Finally, I considered adding relevant illustrations to the boxes, but I was torn. I was unsure if

the extra images would just serve as distractions instead of actually helping. I think I may consider adding illustrations to the white space

at the bottom of each box, but they will have to add something to the information instead of just adding to the cognitive load of the

graphic.
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References

Beah, Ishmael (2007). A Long Way Gone. New York: Sarah Crichton Books.

Lohr, Linda L. (2008). Creating Graphics for Learning and Performance: Lessons in Visual Literacy (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, New

Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc.